Why do Hotels Today Need a CRS & Channel Manager? And it is an absolute necessity for everyone. Yes. Everyone right from a simple guesthouse to 5-star chains.
By Tarun Gulati
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How hard is it to sell rooms in today's hyper-competitive accommodations market? Not as much as it is touted to be; if you are using the right tools.
To bring real efficiency to your hotel's sales process and to ensure that you sell to your absolute highest potential, you just have to have a channel manager integrated CRS system – a single system that keeps a track of all your room inventory & rates, and updates every sales channel in accordance on its own. And it is an absolute necessity for everyone. Yes. Everyone right from a simple guesthouse to 5-star chains.
Our own data shows that clients who adopted our hotel sales automation platform saw an average growth of 39% in revenues during the same time period over the previous year, with an abundant sprinkling of hotels with poor distribution doubling & tripling their revenues & occupancies.
So why did adoption of an integrated CRS & Channel Manager, make such a huge difference? Let's take a look.
• Complete room inventories pushed online, without the fear of overselling
AdHoc inventory management on OTAs more often than not leads to a situation where hotels will only put up bits and pieces of their inventory on each OTA, updating them once in a while due to fear of overselling, which in turn means that your rooms might not be up for sale when travelers are looking for it. That is literally just letting revenues slip out of your hand.
A channel manager integrated CRS will keep every last room open on all OTAs, thereby ensuring that if you have rooms to sell, they are out there and available for grabs.
• Real-time inventory & rate updation, saved the lost last-minute cancellations
Manually updating inventory across OTAs is slow, inefficient and error-prone. This delay in updation often leads to a lot of inventory released due to last-minute cancellations to perish. This becomes particularly damaging during high season. Distribution automation, once again helps you cover these almost lost room nights.
• Having a channel manager incentivized being on more OTAs
This was another key trend that we noticed among our clients. With the confidence of a channel manager & CRS system, even the hoteliers vary of online sales, embraced new OTAs. The huge adoption of our TripAdvisor integrations displayed the level of comfort with online channels that had been achieved by independent, small-scale accommodation providers. And at the end, more visibility is more revenues.
• Resources saved in redundant repetitive tasks are put to better use
Another key outcome was the amount of time and energy that you save with these tools taking over the tedious, yet critical, sales tasks. Hoteliers allocated the saved time & human resources to focus on a number of tasks such as developing better marketing strategies, delivering better guest experiences, and adding ancillary services to their hotels. These activities, in turn, helped them push their revenue capabilities beyond what they would have normally achieved.
Going forward, the online accommodation market is only going to grow & fragment, as more consumers move online, and new distribution channels pop-up. The modern hotelier needs to understand that technology such as channel management tools & CRSs are not an expense, but rather an investment in the present as well as the future.
